For the longest time, something didn’t sit right with me about those slippers on the porch of that abandoned house in Kyushu. Why were they there in the first place? And why were they still there then? it made no sense. Only much later did it occur to me that it was a subtle yet powerful statement of powerlessness.

It must have been a final gesture. And that gesture must have been understood by every curious visitor after: that abandoned house, torn down by the elements for years, slowly falling apart, and yet the slippers stayed there, untouched on the doorstep, left in peace, a metaphor for something I didn’t fully understand.

The meaning of the wooden entrance sill, the agarikamachi, was always subtle but crucial. It was the precise intermediate threshold where one stepped up onto, up from the kutsunugi-ishi (the shoe-removing stone) and then moved on to the raised wooden board floor of the room. The entrance sill, a symbolic delimiter between two boundary spaces; there’s no way that these slippers were a coincidence.

They resonated with me that morning. I managed an image, but it seems impossible to express the full depth of this final act of leaving one’s slippers behind to almost imperceptibly express an uncertain future. Maybe I should invent a new language like the Voynich manuscript you mentioned, or Xu Bing in his Tiānshū and Dì Shu books: a book that nobody can understand, followed by a book that everyone can understand. What a feat.

I would have loved to be there with the couple on the day that they were leaving, and sit together. Have a final cup of tea, open the sliding shutters of the veranda, and stare into the distance together. The impermanence of a moment of perfect symbiosis between the inside and outside world. The Imagism of Ezra Pound comes to mind, stripping to the barest essence in the same way: